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Category: solar power

Congrats Hong Kong Univ.

Researchers at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have fabricated microscopically-small lasers directly on silicon, enabling the future-generation microprocessors to run faster and less power-hungry – a significant step towards light-based computing.

The innovation, made by Prof Kei-may Lau, Fang Professor of Engineering and Chair Professor of the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, in collaboration with the University of California, Santa Barbara; Sandia National Laboratories and Harvard University, marks a major breakthrough for the semiconductor industry and well beyond.

Silicon forms the basis of everything from solar cells to the integrated circuits at the heart of our modern electronic gadgets. However, the crystal lattice of silicon and of typical laser materials could not match up, making it impossible to integrate the two materials until now, when Prof Lau’s group managed to integrate subwavelength cavities — the essential building blocks of their tiny lasers — onto silicon, allowing them to create and demonstrate high-density on-chip light-emitting elements. The finding was recently published as the cover story on Applied Physics Letters.

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As the global headcount nears 8 billion, our thirst for kilowatts is growing by the minute. How will we keep the lights on without overheating the planet in fossil fuel exhaust? Alternative energy is the obvious choice, but scaling up is hard. It would take an area the size of Nevada covered in solar panels to get enough energy to power the planet, says Justin Lewis-Weber, “and to me, that’s just not feasible.” This past March, Lewis-Weber, a then-high school senior in California, came up with a radical plan: self-replicating solar panels—on the moon.

Here’s the gist: When solar panels are orbiting Earth, they enjoy 24 hours of unfiltered sunshine every day, upping their productivity. Once out there, they could convert that solar radiation into electricity (just as existing solar panels do) and then into microwave beams (using the same principle as your kitchen appliance). Those microwaves then get beamed back to Earth, where receivers convert them back into electricity to power the grid. Simple! Except that Lewis-Weber estimates that building and launching thousands of pounds of solar panels and other equipment into space will be outrageously expensive, in the range of hundreds of trillions of dollars.

Instead, he suggested, why not make them on the moon? Land a single robot on the lunar surface, and then program it to mine raw materials, construct solar panels, and (here’s the fun part) make a copy of itself. The process would repeat until an army of self-replicating lunar robot slaves has churned out thousands of solar panels for its power- hungry masters.

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I told folks this; I see another one from Google has joined the QC less than 10 year club. My guess is more likely less than 7 years.

A seminal moment in the quantum technology field just happened: Google’s team of scientists have simulated a hydrogen molecule from its quantum computers, a breakthrough that suggests it could “simulate even larger chemical systems,” writes one of Google Quantum’s engineers, Ryan Rabbush. The search engine’s achievement underscores the technology’s potential as Rabbush posits it can “revolutionize the design of solar cells, industrial catalysts, batteries, flexible electronics, medicines, materials and more.”

As advances in such supercomputers continue, investment and research in this field gathers greater momentum as Google, Alibaba, Baidu, Amazon and other tech giants and governments too are racing to develop this technology. Recently, the European Commission allocated €1 billion to research, incubate and invest in quantum technologies. Meanwhile Google last month made headlines about testing its quantum security to shield its Chrome browser.

“It is a technology that is developing very rapidly,” explains Serguei Beloussov, CEO and founder of data security firm Acronis, adding that industries related to “creativity and human ingenuity” are more difficult to predict and that is the case with this fast-developing field. “Quantum computing at the moment [particularly] quantum metrology and quantum security are things that are dependent on science so [development] can be very slow or rapid. If this technology actually appears, it will be such a huge change that companies like Amazon, Alibaba, Google want to be in front of that change and that is why they are investing,” says this tech expert who is also executive chairman of tech company, Parallels.

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If you think the idea of powering the whole world with solar power is still many years away, prepare to be amazed. The inspired minds at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has succeeded in transmitting solar energy right through the air. Using wireless power transmission may be the best way to gather solar energy from space in order to use it here on Earth.

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A major Japanese machinery company said Friday that it has succeeded in transmitting energy wirelessly, marking a step toward making solar power generation in space a reality.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries said it used to send 10 kilowatts of power—enough to run a set of conventional kitchen appliances—through the air to a receiver 500 metres (1,640 feet) away.

Wireless power transmission is currently under development as the core technology to tap the vast amount of solar energy available in space and use it on Earth.

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The upconversion of photons allows for a more efficient use of light: Two photons are converted into a single photon having higher energy. Researchers at KIT now showed for the first time that the inner interfaces between surface-mounted metal-organic frameworks (SURMOFs) are suited perfectly for this purpose — they turned green light blue. The result, which is now being published in Advanced Materials (“Photon Upconversion at Crystalline Organic–Organic Heterojunctions”), opens up new opportunities for optoelectronic applications such as solar cells or LEDs.

Photon upconversion: energy transfer between the molecules is based on electron exchange

Photon upconversion: energy transfer between the molecules is based on electron exchange (Dexter electron transfer). (Image: Michael Oldenburg)

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In the blackland prairie of Texas, an ocean is thousands of miles away. But Benjamin Blumenthal, co-founder and chief executive officer of SunToWater Technologies, says we’re all standing under the sixth ocean — the one that’s above our heads.

The Carrollton startup makes an appliance that unlocks that water supply. The company’s water generators — each about the size of a central air conditioning unit — use air, salt and solar power to produce gallons of drinkable water. They could bring water to rural communities without a municipal water supply, regions stricken by drought or developing countries with water contamination.

But the company will target a higher-end market first: Homeowners with large lawns to water and swimming pools to fill. Blumenthal said SunToWater is focusing on customers in California and Texas, two states that have coped with an unpredictable, and often limited, water supply and the water restrictions and high utility bills that come with it.

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Magine a future in which hyper-efficient solar panels provide renewable sources of energy, improved water filters quickly remove toxins from drinking water, and the air is scrubbed clean of pollution and greenhouse gases. That could become a reality with the right molecules and materials.

Scientists from Harvard and Google have taken a major step toward making the search for those molecules easier, demonstrating for the first time that a quantum computer could be used to model the electron interactions in a complex molecule. The work is described in a new paper published in the journal Physical Review X by Professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik from the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and several co-authors.

“There are a number of applications that a quantum computer would be useful for: cryptography, machine learning, and certain number-theory problems,” Aspuru-Guzik said. “But one that has always been mentioned, even from the first conceptions of a quantum computer, was to use it to simulate matter. In this case, we use it to simulate chemistry.”

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